Yesterday I said goodbye to the pottery ladies—and to Bobby D., too. The semester was over and I know, looking ahead, that there will not be time in my upcoming world for Wednesday-morning clay.
The thing about clay is that it allows you to fail. Smash it up. Try again. Recook the glaze.
The thing about working in a medium where no one expects you to succeed is that you leave without marks, reviews, evaluations. You laugh it off. You dive into gossip. You show up with your hair in a knot and no one asks for explanations. "What are you making?" they might ask. And I will say, "This."
The work here is the work of my semester. I experimented with trays, added an apple to my apple collection, built an old-looking pot, bent a grid, punched holes into a bowl so that I might someday weave burlap through it.
Someday.
Oh, Pottery Ladies and Bobby D., I will miss you. Thank you for making room for this novice.
Oh, those beautiful pottery ladies. There I was, minding my own clay business, when I saw Karen the Good, who also goes by Queen of Wayne, sneak by. What is that lady doing? I wondered, then went back to trying to figure out how to make my latest project stable.
The next time I looked up, the ladies had gathered around and they were singing. They were singing a birthday song.
How I love them all.
(Bill, the honorary pottery lady, took the photo of the group, but I love him, too.)
So a huge thank you to my friends, and to Karen, for remembering—and for singing—so poignantly well. And the timing is—well—something else, for just this morning I had been remembering a surprise party my mother had thrown for me when I was sixteen years old. Somehow she'd gotten Jim Clancy, Radnor High basketball star, to my basement, along with ice skaters and other friends. I had not had the slightest inkling that something was in the works. I miss my mother on many days, and always on my birthday, and there were the ladies, on this day, stepping in.
So who was the teen me? I write of her here, on
Dear Teen Me, today. The piece begins like this:
You do not have to be good. You don’t have to try so hard. You don’t have to stay so very still inside that box that you have built up for yourself.
Life is meant for living.
Listen.
On a day in which so much kindness overflows that I hardly know what to do, or how many ways I can say thank you, I share these beautiful things as well:
Shelf Awareness shared the
Going Over trailer as the Trailer of the Day,
here. Sarah Laurence reviewed
Going Over so incredibly beautifully
here.And Melissa Firman very kindly makes room for, and say such nice things about,
Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, here.
